Rome Journal; Pinocchio Infatuates Italians (and That's No Lie)

By FRANK BRUNI

Published: October 11, 2002

ROME, Oct. 10—
His likeness is everywhere, beaming impishly from the covers of books, the pages of magazines and the posters at countless bus stops and street corners.

His name is on just about everyone's lips, but there is no unanimity of opinion about him.

He is not Silvio Berlusconi, although the Italian prime minister looms as large as ever here, or George W. Bush, although the American president is beckoning Europe to make war.

They have been supplanted, for now, by a mischievous, mendacious marionette. All across Italy, Pinocchio rules.

With the imminent release here of a new, live-action movie of ''Pinocchio'' by the Italian superstar Roberto Benigni, Italians are in a kind of Pinocchio swoon, attended by a degree of Hollywood-style hoopla and synergistic merchandising that no homegrown movie has previously spawned.

''There has never before been this level of saturation for an Italian film,'' said Claudio Trionfera, a spokesman for Medusa Film, the company distributing ''Pinocchio'' in Italy, where it opens on Friday on about 900 screens, a national record. (A dubbed version is scheduled to open in the United States on Christmas Day.)

That means latex Pinocchio noses and Pinocchio backpacks, along with the requisite Pinocchio dolls.

But this being Italy, where debate and melodramatic overstatement rank just behind soccer as the national sports, it also means that Pinocchio is being deconstructed, pressed into political service and even feminized.

''I heard everyone talking about Pinocchio for the last few months and I thought, 'Why must a piece of wood be male?','' said Vittoria Hazel, author of ''Pinocchia,'' a book published here last week.

It gives Pinocchio a soul mate, exploring the passion between puppets with names that end in different vowels. ''It practically wrote itself,'' Ms. Hazel said.

''In Collodi's book, there are all these closed closets,'' she said, referring to the writer Carlo Collodi's original version in 1883. ''In my book, Pinocchia helps Pinocchio to open those closets and see different worlds.''

Perhaps because Collodi -- whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini -- was Italian, people here feel a special affection for, and attachment to, the Pinocchio tale. Mr. Benigni certainly did. He has said that he dreamed of a new ''Pinocchio'' for years before co-writing a script and getting behind the camera to direct it.

The success of ''Life is Beautiful,'' his Oscar-winning tale of humor amid the horror of the Holocaust, and his status as Italy's most popular filmmaker gave him the clout and the carte blanche he needed. He poured about $45 million into ''Pinocchio,'' another Italian record, and plays the title role, even though he is about to turn 50.

For all those reasons, his ''Pinocchio'' was guaranteed substantial attention, but not necessarily this much.

At one of the Feltrinelli bookstores in Rome, Pinocchio books take up more than just a few shelves. They are scattered and stacked everywhere, and they come in nearly two dozen sizes, shapes and iterations, from Pinocchio comic books to Pinocchio reading primers, from a volume sprinkled with commentary by Mr. Benigni to a volume in Neapolitan dialect.

At Rocco Toys in Rome, there is a talking Pinocchio (''I will become a boy!'') and a ''Pinocchio Design Factory,'' an all-purpose art toy that just happens to be named in Pinocchio's singular -- and, right now, sales-driving -- spirit.

That phenomenon is something with which Americans, whose children have played with ''Star Wars'' lasers and eaten Happy Meals christened in honor of various movies, are well familiar. Pinocchio's invasion of Italy has nothing on the dinosaur takeover of the United States before the release of each and every ''Jurassic Park'' installment.

But there are Italian twists. In a country where just about everything is intrinsically, implicitly or eventually political, Pinocchio popped up in a poster by the rightist National Alliance party, which accused the left of lying, a la Pinocchio.

There is also a striking degree of intellectual energy being poured into the consideration of Pinocchio.

One Italian magazine recently published a five-page spread that included not only a discussion of the special effects in ''Pinocchio'' but also an article titled ''Pinocchio: Sex, Faith and Many Lies.''

An article in another magazine cast Pinocchio as a crucible of quintessentially Italian characteristics, ''intolerant of rules and conformists, lively but listless, greedy for pleasure but ready to shed tears of repentance.''

Mr. De Rienzo, in a recent interview, called the Pinocchio fable ''one of the few fairy tales in a culture without fairy tales.''

''It's characteristically Italian,'' he said, ''a story about the search for liberty but also for order -- very much like 19th-century Italy.''

''Pinocchio,'' he said, ''is living on the line between order and disorder.''

A better description of this city and country would be hard to find.

Photos: Roberto Benigni, as Pinocchio, adorns the covers of several books.; Pinocchio, helped by Hollywood-style hoopla, has won the hearts of Italians. He got a hug from Marina Menasci at her Pinocchio shop in Rome. (Photographs by Riccardo Squillantini for The New York Times)